Disturbing Comments from Old UOSA Vets

[SirEricKain]

This is a list I've compiled of comments and complaints from some old UOSA Vet friends I'm trying to coax into returning here.

The following list is in no particular order of preponderance;

1. "The 3 account rule is not even remotely enforced, if anyone ever gets caught using multiples they just use "I have multiple gamers living in the home." - if this is true it explains why I see miles of occupied homes that are empty. So this means you have a handful of people occupying land they do nothing with but hoard in hopes that the shards population replenishes itself in order to turn a profit, meanwhile this very manner of hoarding deters people from coming back.

Proposed fix - I've got 3 gamers in the house hold, none of us would mind access to a single account each, if it means fairness for the shard and protection against abusers. Let's run a daily, weekly or monthly check on ip vs accounts, deleting the newest accounts passed the 3 permitted accounts automatically.

2. "Unattended resource gathering completely not enforced, and if it is, no findings or reports are made public providing proof of justice being dealt."

Proposed fix - I think this is more of a manpower issue than anything else, although I do think bans and profuse abusers should be left out to hang in public, this will give many of us peace of mind that things are being done to keep this place on the up and up. Perhaps even an event where the persons main account character is put on a wooden platform in game with "rocks" we can throw, that deal 1 dmg per, until the person dies, which leads to a perma ban or deletion of the account there after. I guarantee if you publicize such justice, sending mass emails to all prior accounts, not only will they be overjoyed with a clean up, the content notion itself is unique and will be very entertaining.

3. "Shard events being too random." - I haven't been back long enough to confirm or deny this. They mentioned that an event can pop up at the oddest hour and sometimes 2-3 would show up due to the event being around noon on a Tuesday.

Proposed fix - Making available a comprehensive list of all automatic events, taking a vote on which ones to keep in place and then voting on the most popular preferred time for them to take place, this will ensure maximum attendance. The same rule should apply for player ran events, to give the entire shard opportunity to partake.

Tending to these problems will immediately bring back a good bit of Veterans, and could very well bring many many more new prospects.

I look forward to the future,

[Nickodemuse]

For the random time on events. I assume you are talking about bagball or potion wars, (Monster bash usually has at least an hour heads up) Boom makes the time on these event random to reward people actually logged in playing. He is trying to avoid announcing events so a handful of people who never play log-in for 5-10 minutes, win the prizes and log out.

[SirEricKain]

These random events are fine, we should have both, the people that are active are already active, I'm trying to promote growth for newcomers and old veterans.

Others like myself whom work long hours would like a chance to vote on what events are available and a vote in what times would cater to the masses.

[EffeYhor]

No one buys the more than one player per IP excuse. How about also using mac addresses? If you log in from a 4th account on the same IP with the same mac address.... boom delete. I mean, two people obviously cant play on the same machine at the same time.

::Edit:: I also think 15 houses per player is MORE than overkill, but I'm likely in the minority.

[iamreallysquall]

all sorts of fail going on this thread. the very thing your asking for re: events is the very same reason its not that way. events should be totally random with no rythme or reason to the scheduling and plenty going on already.

[SirEricKain]

I merely brought up the opinions of the few I questioned as to why they left UOSA, this isn't a debate, I see nothing wrong with having both random events for the very active player and a few continual/predictable automated events like the old provoking dungeon, that was awesome.

[Capitalist]

I just feel bad for how mangled the horse looks at this point.

[Soma]

Who are these "Vets"?

[Boomland Jenkins]

Just a note about the housing. For the few shards that make it to year 7, if they don't have a "housing problem" similar to UOSA, it means the shard never had a large peak population or the player base has no confidence in the longevity of the shard and decided refreshing was not worth the effort.

You may see "fields of empty houses" but as a long term UO player myself, it was not uncommon for me to put all my loot in my main home while sitting on empty properties for their long term value - no loot inside, so when selling tiem came I wouldn't have to unload loot from it.

Do I think everyone is playing by the books? No, but we do keep our eyes open regarding this.

As for events - as people said, they are random on purpose. We have no automated events on Second Age. In order for an event to begin, a GM has to be online to start it and run it. Scheduled storyline events are a little more predictable but I don't think that's what your old UOSA vets are referencing.

[tiredat52]

There is no reason to cater to whiney vets...if you like the game come back....if you want to whine start a blog!

[SirEricKain]

Still doesn't address the other issues, like not enforcing the 3 account rule, match the 70-100 unique IP's multiply by 15 and you'll see 10x that in occupied housing.

Management has always been very helpful, firm and fair. I just wish when bans go out the public can know about it, so we "see" something being done about the abuses.

Nothing has been stated about my stone throwing idea, am I the only one that thinks this would be awesome?

Look up the 5 most active guilds we used to be allied with, that used to be here and that are now in a trammel UO:R and you will have your names of VET's.

Beating a dead horse or not, I'm trying to bring about some change, and I'm not talking the Obama type of change either.

[Soma]

Nothing has been stated about my stone throwing idea, am I the only one that thinks this would be awesome?

Yes.

[Kaivan]

I'll try to address the two points that you felt were unaddressed.

First, regarding account abuses:

While it is likely true that some players do game the system to utilize more than their fair share of accounts, we have to use an evidenced based approach to determine whether that's true or not. For example, if a claim is levied that a particular player has access to and uses 6 or more accounts, we would need concrete evidence that the player is actually using those accounts to take action against them. This requires us to see it as it happens, or find concrete evidence stemming from other sources, and that information isn't procured by simply clicking on a button to see the evidence.

Additionally, there are a significant number of houses that are owned by players who don't generally play, and are up-kept by other players who simply refresh those houses for them by being friended. While this doesn't erase the possibility that players are gaming the system, it would be foolhardy to suggest that 100% of all vacant houses fall into the other category. As a matter of pure function, it is far more likely that multiple people either have others refresh their houses, or simply log on just to refresh their own houses on a regular basis than it is that a single player owns hundreds of houses, or even that multiple players owning 60 houses apiece.

As a last point on this subject, it is important to consider that the current live IP count is not reflective of the entire population of the server as a whole. IF we see 100 unique IP addresses, this does not mean that the population of the server is 100, and no more. It is possible that more than one person lives at a given location (yes, it actually happens), and a random sample of users at any given point of the day will necessarily exclude anyone who didn't decide to play on that day, or doesn't play on the chosen day in general. Regardless of these factors, we do investigate if someone believes that another player is violating the account limit, but it isn't some simple process that we just don't do.

Regarding AFK resource gatherers:

We do actually check on resource gatherers to determine whether they are there or not, and we have methods of tracking all players that are gathering resources. As for our policy against AFK resource gatherers, we have a 3 strikes rule against AFK resource gathering that starts at a warning, then a 24 hour ban, and finally a permanent ban if you are caught gathering resources a third time Does this policy and means to track all players gathering resource guarantee that we will always catch all AFK resource gatherers? No (we actually have to check on them). But we do police against these sorts of things, and we do catch them (one was caught in the writing of this post).

As for publicizing bans due to AFK resource gathering, we do not publicize the reasons for any bans, as it is a matter between the offending player and the administration. While we do realize that this doesn't create the kind of transparency that players want, we do not view it as an appropriate step to put anyone on the spot, especially after they were just banned.

Of course, as always, if you feel that someone is AFK resource gathering, please page in and we'll try to look into it. We won't always be there to catch them, but we'll do our best when we're there.

[Roser]

There is close to 500 unique IP's that log in every day, this can be seen by saying !status in IRC right before server down. So there is your answer to housing right there. Vet's who no longer play here still log in to refresh their houses, I believe many of them are waiting for something to happen before they become active again, perhaps a higher population, some sort of action, auto event's, I cant say for sure.

In my opinion I think we need to draw ideas from the past to grow the server today. I highly agree with you Kain when you say we should have both unscheduled and scheduled "quick events". These scheduled events such as Tournaments, CTF's, and Double Domination's were a cornerstone of action in the past - they created a hype to log in, hours of action beforehand and afterwards and were quite fun to take part in. Do they need to be reworked to fit our era? Probably. Is it ok to use scripts to run them? Why not.

The website. Take a moment and compare our website with other servers and then realize that we are the ugly one of the bunch, Boomland has a really nice website that would make a great replacement and I hope staff is going forward with that. MyUOSA used to have leader board's matched with the tournaments and I am super sad that that part of our website/game is gone. If you look at UOR's website, they have literally copy and pasted that portion of MyUOSA and are now using it just like we were here. Leader boards of all kinds would be fantastic - monster kills, player kills, bounties collected, tournament wins, bagball wins etc etc...

This era is widely known and accepted as the best era to PvP in - we must embrace that as we have in the past. One of the most important reasons people aren't playing here anymore (opinion) is because those old quick events I previously mentioned were catered to the PvP crowd and they truly left a gaping hole in the PvP scene here. I absolutely love Boomlands event's, I think the ongoing quests are something special and unmatched in the UO scene right now and without them the server pop would probably have dwindled to barley playable levels. They are however not catered directly to the PvP'ers that want those frequent instant gratification style tournament's we had in the past.

Lastly, I think a lot of people miss Derrick our glorious god of the realm and father of all creation. All Hail!. Seeing him take an active interest in the community would likely show the vet's that this isn't a dying shard and that it's worth coming back to. I don't know about the rest of you, but anytime he made a post (especially a patch note) I got pretty hyped up, hes a rad dude.

[Apoc]

[quote="SirEricKain"]This is a list I've compiled of comments and complaints from some old UOSA Vet friends I'm trying to coax into returning here.

Who have you spoken with ...